Qiming Tang, Qingfeng Song, Xiaoxiang Ni, Zai Shi, Genyun Chen, Xinguang Zhu

Photosynthesis close interacts with respiration and nitrogen assimilation, which determine the photosynthetic efficiency of a leaf. Accurately quantifying the metabolic fluxes in photosynthesis, respiration and nitrogen assimilation benefit the design of photosynthetic efficiency improvement. To accurately estimate metabolic fluxes, time-series data including leaf metabolism and isotopic abundance changes should be collected under precisely controlled environments. But for isotopic labelled leaves under defined environments the, time cost of manually sampling usually longer than the turnover time of several intermediates in photosynthetic metabolism. In this case, the metabolic or physiological status of leaf sample would change during the sampling, and the accuracy of metabolomics data could be compromised.